There was a time when I thought it would
be a mistake to have children. In the late 1970’s, the probability of large
scale nuclear contamination of the world, sometime during the likely lifespan
of the next generation, seemed high enough to make being born a dubious
proposition. What favor would it be to
bring a child into world with the prospect of
a nuclear winter on the horizon?

And then everything changed. Suddenly,
with detente and then the end of the USSR, the prospect of wholesale nuclear
interchange evaporated. Yes, there was, and still is, a risk of local
interchanges. Those would still have devastating effects for worldwide
agricultural production for two decades (Robock and Toon, 2012) but they would
not end all life. And so I had children. But
my sense of (relative) equanimity has been short lived. My nuclear
fears for my children have now been
replaced by climate fears. Not for them, their children or even their
grandchildren, but for the generations
that will follow.

But is
there any reason to think that climate change could have catastrophic
consequences akin to a nuclear winter? James Hansen (2008) thinks there
is. Hansen et al.’s (2005) modeling
suggests that amplifying feedbacks that can realize runaway scenarios in
which the planet stabilizes in a (cold) state akin to Mars at -500C
or a (hot) state akin to Venus at +4500C. In the Mars scenario,
increasing surface albedo as the planet cools is the amplifying force. In the
Venus scenario, increasing water vapor as the planet warms drives things. But
there is a big difference between these two scenarios. Runaway cooling has
happened before (most recently 640 million years ago) but is subject to change
as weathering and rising atmospheric CO2 reverse the process. However
Hansen argues that there is no such reversing process in the case of runaway
heating, hence the potential for mass permanent extinction.

The crisis of the nuclear and the crisis
of climate, have something in common, beyond their overwhelming destructive
potential. They not only both prompt a sense of utter helplessness for us as individuals, a sense
of something totally out of our control.
More than that, it is not just that there is a sense that they are out
of our personal control, but that in the end that they are just not
controllable, a sense that collective rational action is somehow beyond our
reach.

If anything, the dissolution of the
nuclear crisis underscores this sense. After all, it did not come about in any
plan full way. There was no grand bargain. Instead, the world stumbled into a
good outcome while dodging many bullets along the way. There was a sense that a
bad outcome was much more likely than a good one. But if a bad outcome was more
likely that a good one in the nuclear case, what is the balance between the
good and the bad outcomes in the climate case? When the United States and the
USSR faced each other with massive nuclear arsenals, the strategy of mutually
assured destruction made for an all or none calculus by design. There would be
peace or the apocalypse. But climate change is a more complicated matter. Even
if Hansen’s Venus scenario is a possibility, it is only one of many
possibilities, even if it is the worst of them. Our difficulty is that we don’t
know the likely degree of climate change nor its cost. Policy questions about
avoiding climate change thus involve decisions under uncertainty that are much
more complex than those involving nuclear war.

II

One way to think about such decisions is
to do our best to fix the value of both the likelihood of climate change and
its cost. Such a project is far from straightforward because it not only
touches on our epistemic limitations but also on assumptions about the valuation of present costs versus future
benefits. In Chapter One I begin by
contrasting making such decisions about avoiding climate change with the way we
think about decisions involving risk and
benefits closer to home. An obvious difference would seem to be this. My
decision not to smoke involves a
calculus of self-interest. The risks and benefits are mine. Avoiding climate
change is a calculus between our interests now and those of others in future
generations. While that may not make a difference when it comes to collective
self-interest, I argue that it does when it comes to individual risk
perception, which is crucial for support of government action for the
collective good. Collective self-interest or not, when it comes to climate
change, how are we to evaluate its risks and costs? In Chapter Two I examine an
approach that seems to sidestep this challenge. Never mind what the chances of
anthropogenic causes of climate change really are, or the likely costs. However
small the chances are, if it is possible that climate change could produce
catastrophic outcomes (à la Venus scenario), should we not avoid them, whatever
the cost? On one variant of this argument, the cost of such an outcome would be
infinite if we consider all of the future generations who would be deprived of
existence, and so paying any price would seem “rational” as long as it is less
than the cost of extinction. But what if the cost is not infinite, but merely
very very high? (For after all, life on earth will end eventually, if only
because the sun becomes a red giant.) Then the calculus becomes much more complicated. How can I be
sure the price to avoid extinction is
not more than the cost of extinction? I
defend the view that even though the costs of extinction are not infinite, they
are high enough that we can effectively ignore this question. But to do so, I
surely need to argue that we have an obligation to future generations of human
beings.

The standard literature on future
generations assumes there will be future beings but that their identities and
numbers are a function of our actions today. But what if my actions now cause
total human extinction in the future? Then whom have I wronged? Constructing a philosophical framework to
support the intuition that here too I have done wrong, even though I wronged no
one, is the challenge I take on in Chapter Three. The attempt to do so lays the
groundwork for a much more controversial project, to make sense of the idea
that our actions can also wrong non-humans.

Whatever our obligations to others may
be, if we have any, what then? In Chapters Four and Five I examine the question
of how we should divide up those obligations. In contemporary political
discourse the answer is quite simple, the problem of climate was caused by the
Developed World and so it is up to the Developed World to solve the problem.
Moreover, the common perception is that since clean energy is available, it is
just a question of whether we are willing to pay the higher costs for using it
and who should pay those costs. Whoever does pay, the interests of the
Developing World and the Developed World are taken to be aligned in that we all
lose in the face of climate change. As such, avoiding climate change trumps
development for everyone, including the poor. And since the poor are
overwhelmingly concentrated in the Developing World, so too, in the end,
avoiding climate change will trump development in the Developing World.

But scratch the surface and none of this
is as straightforward as it may seem at first blush. I argue that who did what,
when, and who owes whom what is not only complicated morally but very dependent
on where we stand in time. A few years from now, things will look very
different because of the growing output of the Developing World. So from where we look at things in time
matters. The idea that clean energy can be had, but that it is only a matter of
cost, not only makes assumptions about the availability of such energy but the
rate at which the infrastructure to distribute it can be deployed in comparison
to the rate of growth of energy demand. The idea that short term interests may,
in fact, trump long term interests for the poor on the assumption that a clean
energy supply cannot reconcile these two interests occupies much of Chapter Four.
There I examine the problem very much looking from the outside in, even when it
comes to judgments of rational choice. What happens if we look at the same
choices from the inside out? In Chapter Five I examine how the circumstances of poverty shape the perceived
calculus of risk, and in doing so, further tip the balance in favor of the
short term for better or worse.

But the poor are not alone in tipping
this balance. As I argue in Chapter Six, another way this happens is the result
of the how we approach the distribution of risk collectively through insurance
and disaster relief programs, and the
way in which that affects the rationality of our decision making individually.

What if we look instead to our political
leaders to save us from our individual, narrow, short-term interests? In
Chapter Seven I examine the standard argument that, absent a comprehensive
agreement, the problem of the Tragedy of
the Commons seems to cast doubt on how likely this is to happen. That is the idea that some countries’ self-constraint
will be exploited by others so there is no motivation for any country to show
constraint, leading to disaster for all. But I argue that this is the wrong way
to analyze the reluctance of countries to negotiate about climate, and indeed
that the widespread belief that climate change is an instance of the Tragedy of
the Commons limits our horizon of possibility.

In theory at least, some countries
(notably China and the United States) are large enough in their share of the
world economy that they could unilaterally implement policies that would force
others to follow. In Chapter Eight I examine why it is that China and the
United States have failed to do so and will likely continue to fail to do so if
it means slowing economic growth. On the other hand, some economies are too
small to implement policies on their own and force others to follow. Yet some
of them (California and the United Kingdom) have nonetheless chosen to implement such policies. In Chapter
Nine I examine their reasons for doing so and ask whether theirs is a model
that could be generalized to the rest of the world. At the risk of depriving
the reader of a sense of suspense, the answer turns out to be that they likely
could not be so generalized, in large part because they depend on the perceived
advantages of being early adopters.

Avoiding the risks of climate change
through political leadership will only happened if it is achieved collectively.
But that will only be possible if political leaders take a multi-generational
view of interests and don’t set the discount rate on the future too high.
Absent this I argue we will only be moved to act collectively when the accumulated effects of climate
change are clearly attributable to it and widely distributed enough in time and
place to affect most of the globe. But by then, it may be too late to act
without avoiding serious effects of climate change. What then, if anything, is
to be done? In Chapter Ten I argue that this logic should drive us to take the
need for air capture geoengineering seriously, despite its costs and potential
risks.

Whether we act now by reducing carbon
output or act later by attempting to remove it from the atmosphere presumes we
are willing to act. The upshot of my argument is that we have a moral
imperative to act, if not for our own species then for others. That may be the
end of it when it comes to a philosophical argument. But in the last chapter I
examine the interplay between ethics and psychology to examine why following
such an imperative seems so hard.

III

In David Guggenheim’s
2006 documentary,An Inconvenient Truth (for print version
see Gore 2006), Al Gore shows a picture of the land in Tennessee on which he
grew up:

You
look at that river gently flowing by. You notice the leaves rustling with the
wind. You hear the birds; you hear the tree frogs. In the distance you hear a
cow. You feel the grass. The mud gives a little bit on the river bank. It’s
quiet; it’s peaceful.

Gore speaks movingly about his desire not
to see the land’s beauty ravaged by climate change. But in
doing so, he allows the impression that all we need to do is to make a few
changes and the rest will be business as usual. For us, and him on his
land. Change my light bulbs. Drive less. Heat my house less. Fly less. The
Sierra Club gives me a list of ten
things. I am advised to plant a tree in my garden. Others have longer to do
lists for me. Puffing out its chest, Vanity Fair (Porter 2006) demands another
forty things. (I should forgo preheating the oven.) Not to be outdone, the Palm
Beach Post (Schwed 2007) offers ninety nine prescriptions! (Use a hand potato
masher instead of an electric one.) George Marshall (2007, 135) says I ought
not to think of any of this as a sacrifice. He says I will feel proud. My new
life style “will be a statement of who I am – a smart aware person living in
the 21st century.”

Al Gore and me, standing shoulder to
shoulder. Why am I so unmoved? I want to be moved. I want to move. Yet here I
sit. Unmoved. My lethargy might be because I really don’t think my actions will
make much of a difference. But I don’t think my voting makes a difference. Yet
the same thought does not stop me voting. Of course I only have to vote once in
a while, so it is an act of minimal inconvenience. Is it that what I am asked
to do here is so inconvenient and
complicated?

If that is not bad enough, others demand
even more of me. I need to change our whole outlook on life to save the planet.
Gus Speth (2008) says I have to stop looking at nature as a means to my ends. I
am too materialistic and too individualistic. Bill McKibben (2006) says I have
to reintegrate human society and nature and foreswear anthropocentrism for a
“biocentric” world view. I am told I should
embrace a humbler world. If I listen to Speth and McKibben, I need to turn
my life upside down. Even if I wanted to do that, I don’t even know how to
begin. The contours of my life are sown into a web of relations that makes such
a change hard to contemplate except as a
fantasy. I give everything away, sever all ties, live in shack, tend my fields
and collect firewood. Even if that is fine for some, it is not for me.

Al Gore whispers in my ear: “Ignore McKibben and Speth! They are
naysayers and luddites. Walden Pond romantics! Stick with me. Together we can
solve thisproblem.Yes, big changes are needed, but that does
not mean our way of life has to change. All we need to do as a nation is … to commit to producing 100 percent of
our electricity from renewable energy and truly clean carbon-free sources
within 10 years. … When President John F. Kennedy challenged our nation to land
a man on the moon and bring him back safely in 10 years, many people doubted we
could accomplish that goal. But 8 years and 2 months later, Neil Armstrong and
Buzz Aldrin walked on the surface of the moon. … We must now lift our nation to
reach another goal that will change history. Our entire civilization depends
upon us now embarking on a new journey of exploration and discovery. Our
success depends on our willingness as a people to undertake this journey and to
complete it within 10 years. Once again, we have an opportunity to take a giant
leap for humankind." (This Gore quote and those that follow are partly
fictional (in italics) and partly based on his speech given on July 17th
2008 at Constitution Hall Washington copy available at: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=92638501, accessed May 16th
2011.)

Is it that simple? Merely a matter of
will and our (American) ingenuity? Gore makes it seem almost un-American to
wonder if there really is a technical solution merely waiting for the ambitious
to grab. For him there is always a
technical solution to every problem. That is what makes America America! And if
my friends still die of cancer decades after a Kennedy-like moon program was
declared to defeat it, we just have not tried hard enough. But if I am allowed
to stamp my foot and command discovery or innovation, I too can solve any
problem. And in the long run, no doubt we can solve the problem. But as Keynes
reminded us, in the long run we are all dead.

Gore points his finger at me. “Maybe you didn’t listen to my speech
carefully enough. I said we can solve this problem in 10 years. All we need to
decide to do it do it!”

I don’t get it, don’t facts intrude?
Where do we store the power for use at night when there is no wind or light?
What about China and India’s rising energy needs? Gore casts a condescending
eye on me. “Of course there are those
who will tell us this can't be done. Some of the voices we hear are the
defenders of the status quo - the ones with a vested interest in perpetuating
the current system, no matter how high a price the rest of us will have to pay.
But even those who reap the profits of the carbon age have to recognize the
inevitability of its demise. As one OPEC oil minister observed, ‘The Stone Age
didn't end because of a shortage of stones.”’

Right. It ended because a more productive
cost effective technology came along. Al Gore in his bully pulpit, stamping his
foot can’t change the fact that that is just what we lack for now and the
foreseeable future. “You know, if you had
paid attention you would have heard me call for CO2 caps and revenue
neutral taxes! It is all so simple.”

I affect a professorial mien to add some gravitas to my
brief. “China will move 240 million people from the country to the cities by
2025 and two thirds of its population will live in urban areas. City people in
China use more than twice the energy of
country people. Over 400 million people in India population lack electricity.
India’s national goal is to be 100% electrified by 2030 and its electrical
demand is projected to grow five to six fold by 2050.” (Woetzel et al. 2009,
Remme et al. 2011.)

“Look,”says Gore, “it is also essential that the United States rejoin the
global community and lead efforts to secure … a global partnership that
recognizes the necessity of addressing the threats of extreme poverty and
disease as part of the world's agenda for solving the climate crisis.”

IV

It all seems too easy. In India 68.7% of
the population lives on less than $2 a day.[1] It
just signed a 25 year contract to import 9 billion tons of coal annually from
the United States.[2]

600 million of us got the life we have
because of our industrial revolution which would not have been possible without
energy to fuel it. Between 1820 and
2004, United States primary energy consumption grew from .837 quadrillion BTU to 100 quadrillion BTU, even as energy consumption per real
dollar of GDP fell over time: from 66,690 to 9,400 btu per dollar of GDP. (By
comparison, China’s 2006 energy consumption was 13,799 BTU per real dollar of GDP (PPP).) (See: U.S.
Energy Information Administration 2010 (a),(b),(c), Maddison 2007, 379.) Now 6
billion more want to improve their lives. Even if they don’t reach our standard
of living, the numbers alone will drive the growth in energy demand, which is
expected to increase by 45% in the next 20 years of which 70% will come from
Developing World. (See Figures 2 and 3.)

Figure 2: World Energy Consumption
1990-2035

Figure 3: Developing and Developed World
Energy Consumption 1990-2035

At the same time, renewable and nuclear
energy cannot be expected to grow from current levels (7% of current total
energy) to fill this demand. Looking just at electricity, the anticipated mix
can be seen in Figure 4.

Figure 4: World Electrical Generation
2007-2035

And of course, electrical demand is only
a portion of the source of the problem, as seen in Figures 5 and 6.

Figure 5: Emissions of CO2 by
Sector and Fuel Type

Figure 6: Sources of CO2
Emissions

But if that is not bad enough, there is
an even worse scenario. Because household size is inversely correlated with
household income, we cannot expect population to stabilize (at roughly 9
billion people) without such growth. (See for example Murdoch 1980.)

Either way then, we face increasing
demand for energy. But ongoing
population growth implies ongoing
energy growth. As such, the only way to limit energy use in the long run is to stabilize population. But the only way
to stabilize population is through raising household income. And the only way
to raise household income is through increased energy use. Short of a drastic
reduction of population from current levels, the challenge of climate change is
not simply whether or not we are willing to live simpler lives to avoid it. It
is whether or not we can provide the needed energy for population levels to
stabilize without producing damaging changes in the climate. As we will see,
this is no trivial calculus when it comes to both considerations of both economics
and of ethics. But, above all, it is a non-trivial calculus because of our limited knowledge about the risks of
climate change itself.

Thus the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC 2013 Technical Summary 50, 63) AR5 Synthesis Report’s projections has a best
estimate of a 3.7oC rise in global mean temperature by the end of the 21st
century, but a likely range between 2.60 and 4.80C under the
“business as usual” scenario of
rapid economic growth in which fossil fuels play a primary role (BAU), while on the same
scenario, global sea level rise is projected to be between .45 and .81 meters
with a best estimate of .62 meters. (See Table 1.)

Beyond the end of this
century the consequences of business as usual becomes even more stark with a
projected range between 3 – 12.60C over
1986-2005 average global mean surface temperature (IPCC 2013, Technical
Summary, 60). (See Figure 7.)

Naomi Oreskes
and Erik Conway (2011)
rightly claim that elimination of all doubt (in favor of certainty) is not part and parcel of the scientific
process and go on to tell the sorry talk about the misuse of appeals doubt in
scientific policy debates. Oreskes and Conway think that scientific knowledge
is created by a consensus of scientific opinion, a view which correctly makes
such knowledge still revisable in the light of new evidence. But the problem is
that policy cannot always afford to wait for such consensus to develop. Indeed,
when it comes to climate change, while there may be scientific consensus on the
role of humans in causing temperature changes over the last 100 years, looking forward,
our models become more uncertain the further out we project into the future in
an attempt to predict how much temperature change there will be. In this sense,
demanding scientific consensus is no better a requirement than demanding the
elimination of all doubt (unless it is consensus in favor of doubt itself). And
whether the public accepts that there is scientific consensus about the causes
of temperature changes in the past is irrelevant. What matters is on what basis
we should decide on policy looking forward without much confidence about the
severity of climate change in the future, not because of lack of consensus but
because of the limitations of our current climate models. All of this is to say
that doubt pervades our current climate science when it comes to confidence
about the future. What stance should we take toward this uncertainty?

Now Oreskes and Conway would have us
believe that we pay a high price for embracing doubt when it comes to rational
decision making because “the outcome of a rational decision-theory analysis is
that if your knowledge is uncertain, then your best option is generally to do
nothing” (Oreskes and Conway
2011, 267). If that were correct then we ought to do nothing about climate risk
since uncertain is just what our knowledge of the severity of climate change
is. But Oreskes and Conway would also
have us believe that “[i]f we didn’t
know that smoking was dangerous, but we did know that it gave us pleasure, we
would surely decide to smoke, as millions of Americans did before the 1960s”
(Oreskes and Conway
2011, 267). That is surely wrong. Despite the deliberate corporate attempts to fan doubts to undermine the
evolving consensus about the risks of smoking that that Oreskes and Conway detail in their book,
we didn’t need to know that smoking
was dangerous to make a rational decision that it was not worth the risk that
it might be dangerous and that those
risks outweighed the benefits.

Waiting for scientific knowledge, for
scientific consensus, before making policy choices is not a luxury we always
have. Instead, we often need to make policy decisions when our knowledge is
uncertain, but it does not follow that under such circumstances our “best
option is generally to do nothing,” as
Oreskes and Conway suggest (Oreskes and Conway
2011, 267).

Your internist refers you to a specialist
for a growth. The specialist recommends surgery and chemotherapy. You decide to
get a second opinion. That specialist recommends just surgery. It turns out
there is no consensus among specialists.
Or perhaps there is consensus about this: we just don’t know whether
surgery and chemotherapy produces better results than surgery alone. What
should you do? How should you decide? Common sense would suggest it is a matter
of how much risk and pain from the chemotherapy itself you are willing to bear
in case the addition of it were to
produce better results. You pay a premium to (perhaps) increase your
probability of a cure. In buying insurance we pay a premium to offset the costs
of untoward outcomes should they occur. Here we pay a premium to reduce the
chance of untoward consequences from happening in the first place. How to price the premium in either case is
easy if we know both the risk and the cost of what we are trying to avoid. When
we don’t, the choice is still easy when the premium is trivial. (For example,
my doctor has me take a low dose aspirin pill once a day
because there is some evidence that it might reduce the risk of a heart
attack.) But calculating the correct price to pay for avoiding climate change
(the premium) is anything but trivial as
our knowledge of the risks and costs of climate change are limited. How then to
proceed?